Posted
by
BeauHDon Friday November 17, 2017 @11:30PM
from the winners-and-losers dept.

Camel Pilot writes: The new GOP tax plan -- which just passed the House -- will tax tuition waivers as income. Graduate students working as research assistants on meager stipends would have to declare tuition waivers as income on the order of $80,000 income. This will force many graduate students of modest means to quit their career paths and walk away from their research. These are the next generation of scientists, engineers, inventors, educators, medical miracle workers and market makers. As Prof Claus Wilke points out: "This would be a disaster for U.S. STEM Ph.D. education." Slashdot reader Camel Pilot references a report via The New York Times, where Erin Rousseau explains how the House of Representatives' recently passed tax bill affects graduate research in the United States. Rousseau is a graduate student at M.I.T. who studies the neurological basis of mental health disorders. "My peers and I work between 40 and 80 hours a week as classroom teachers and laboratory researchers, and in return, our universities provide us with a tuition waiver for school. For M.I.T. students, this waiver keeps us from having to pay a tuition bill of about $50,000 every year -- a staggering amount, but one that is similar to the fees at many other colleges and universities," he writes. "No money from the tuition waivers actually ends up in our pockets, so under Section 117(d)(5), it isn't counted as taxable income." Rousseau continues by saying his tuition waivers will be taxed under the House's tax bill. "This means that M.I.T. graduate students would be responsible for paying taxes on an $80,000 annual salary, when we actually earn $33,000 a year. That's an increase of our tax burden by at least $10,000 annually."

Maybe the homegrown ones wouldn't be flipping burgers for a living if we didn't. But hey, it's more fun to look down on them because you're angry they went to grad school than it is to address the problem. Nothing like getting the working class to fight among themselves to keep those profits maximized.

No, America is going to collapse because too many of you think this is an adequate riposte to the OP. Whether the result of ideology, stupidity or some toxic mix, this impoverished thinking is what will do for you.

Good, the universities' system of indentured servitude needs to be called out. Either the tuition is part of their pay, in which case it needs to be handed over to the student, or it's not, in which case, they're working for less than minimum wage and need to be paid appropriately. This shit was unethical when coal companies did it in the Appalachians, it's just as wrong now when the ivory tower does it.

For decades the skills and liars in government, media, and banking have perpetuated the myth that everyone should go to college. Tens of millions of Americans were promised that their degree would lead to a good job.

It was all a pack of lies (to quote the great Phil Collins). College is largely a scam. It serves mostly as an indoctrination center to keep people have thinking critically, and while wasting four years and gobs of money, most graduates walk away with no useful skills.

"largely a scam".... Bogus generalization and demonstrably false.

As a developer, I have worked with many people who went to college, many who did not. Those who attended a good program of study were consistently better prepared for the work. More disciplined, better informed, more confident, better prepared to keep up with the changes to the intellectual environment required to make proper contribution to our products. That has been true in every organization I have worked in from Cable TV through avionics, logistics automation, communication, industrial data acquisition and control. Co-workers with the discipline to get a proper grounding in the theory consistently hit the ground running and are more productive, more flexible, and arrive with a better toolkit for delivering results.

There have been exceptional workers who are just plain brilliant and have learned on the job, and there have been those who managed to get through the course of study while avoiding the getting education part of it, but those are exceptions not the general rule.

On the original subject: Taxing people who managed to get into and be successful in advanced grad programs for the tuition that they would be paying if not for doing the work of teaching or research is a perfect example of short term thinking. It shows a complete failure to understand where improvements in productivity that produce true economic growth come from.

This "tax cut" 10 years out fucks the 99% to help out the 1%. Everything I hear about it is wrong. It's truly amazing how the R's can't avoid putting the booger hook on the bang switch, taking off some tootsies in the process.

The Economist had an article on taxes many moons ago . . . they stated that taxing is like plucking a goose for pillow feathers. You want to get a maximum of feathers, with a minimal amount of fuss.

University graduate students are not very high up on the list of favored Republican supporters . . . actually they are probably not even high up on the list of favored Democrat supporters either.

Graduate students are not going to go out on the streets with violent "Graduate Student Lives Matter!" protests.

So Congress says, tax 'em, and let them whine.

Fair? Who cares . . . taxes are not about being fair. Taxes need to bring in revenue.

That's just tough shit . . . the government just needs to pick out the right group to tax. Cigarette smokers get the hell taxed out of them, but can't pull off a political coup. Graduate students won't be able to push any political pressure points either.

What this really shows is that the Republicans and their wealthy donors don't give a shit about the USA. This assault on education will impact the long term success of the USA in many ways.

That's right: the very people who benefit from a strong economy (the top 0.1%) don't give a shit about the long term future of the USA. They plan to milk it then (mixing metaphors) abandon ship.

I don't know what is the next country they plan to milk and screw over -- perhaps China? This is what is going on in Brazil right now and the result is large numbers of people living in the hovels they call favellas.

There's a new group loosely called "populists", which are being elected under the guise of Republicans at the moment. These are the ones who put the welfare of the citizens ahead of everything else.

I have a bridge to sell you, and some fine land in Florida.

Seriously, they really have conned you, haven't they?

These populists are blowhards who are supported by ultra-wealthy interests, who pander to the worst instincts of low information voters. People who want to impose their own will on others in many aspects of life. People who think that they alone have the framework for a moral life, rejecting any competing ideas.

Just look at the tax plan: promoted by the biggest populist of them all: Donald Trump. It's a huge bung to ultra-wealthy, a minor tax cut for a few middle-class people, and a tax increase for many other middle class people.

McConnell demanded that Moore leave the election, and told Moore that even if he won he would be immediately ousted from the Senate. All based on accusations, many which have been shown to be fraudulent.

Well, there are two problems with that.

1. Even if some of the accusations are fraudulent (and none have been proven to be so), others remain. Moore didn't even deny all the allegations.

2. McConnell is also the enemy. You support the Republicans despite their policies being aimed to impoverish ordinary people and put your faith in people who are even more right-wing, even more determined to impoverish ordinary people.

There's a new group loosely called "populists", which are being elected under the guise of Republicans at the moment. These are the ones who put the welfare of the citizens ahead of everything else.

The "populists" are the ones who are making sure those middle and working class people can still get a tax write-off for their private planes, and will now be able to bring back "trophies" when they go on their African safaris.

The "populists" are the ones laundering Russian drug money through their real estate deals. The "populists" are the ones trying to get $15,000,000.00 to kidnap and deliver a foreign national to a corrupt Turkish dictator. The "populists" are the ones who have been shown in the Paradise Papers to be involved in deals with Russian oligarchs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Clearly, they're concerned about the well-being of the common American.

McConnell demanded that Moore leave the election

Because Moore is a pedophile. He diddled little girls to show what a staunch "populist" his is.

Then Al Franken was accused with photographic evidence and... crickets from McConnell.

Actually, McConnell immediately started a Senate Ethics Committee investigation into Franken. The same kind that got Bob Packwood tossed out of Congress not long ago.

The 'populists' are useful idiots. All that is required to win their support is to wave the flag a lot, talk about how great America is and blame every problem upon immigrants and foreigners.

Moore did not win because he was standing up for the people: He won because he isn't ashamed to tell the people that Christians are the best, nonbelievers are all America-hating commie filth, and that homosexuals are plotting to rape their children. It's Alabama, that sort of thing goes down well there.

"They've been giving their high income people a discount on their federal taxes by passing those costs along to some guy installing mufflers who lives in a state that doesn't hit their residents so hard."

Blue states subsidize red states. I know that fact is upsetting to "hard-working" red staters who get welfare from people in blue states, but they'll just have to deal with the fact they're moochers.

CA and NY pay much more (average, per resident) into DC than they get back. They're subsidizing red states. Frankly, CA would be better off being independent -- economically speaking, they don't need the other 49 states.

"I also expect that eliminating the state deduction will force out of control liberal states to lower their taxes and stop flushing money down the toilet and useless social programs that only grow every year but don't help the people they're supposed to much less have an end goal."
Sure, as soon as we end Red State welfare.
This comes in the form of
1) Any economic depressed area program (Appalachia comes to mind, its one of 5)
2) End Agricultural subsidies
3) End federal tax breaks for mineral extractio

Do you really think that most of our military spending over the past 15 years has been on "defense" instead of misdirected wars of aggression? Case in point, we invaded Iraq two years after 9/11. Did we do a damned thing to Saudi Arabia, the country that actually financed terrorist filth worldwide? Did we? Thinking about it...

I'm not saying our military is completely useless, but if we cut spending on it by 50%, we'd still be fine as a country -- our quality of life would not be affected.

Maybe you should stop and ask WHY it costs so much to live in blue states, and why for blue states, the metrics that matter are so awful.

Because it's actually worth living there? Check e.g. the life expectancy [wikipedia.org] per state.

As for taxes: Surprising as it may seem, government is not sucking in money like a vacuum cleaner and then burning it in huge bonfires. It's spending the money, to a large part on services like roads, schools, policing, health services (well, in civilised societies), defence, and so on. Many of these services benefit from an enormous economy of scale (a road from one end of your private plot to the other end is unlikely to

It is quite amusing that someone who doesn't realize this entire tax bill is a sham to give tax breaks to the wealthy is accusing others of being in an echo chamber.

Although I do agree that everything about the tax bill isn't bad. Just the entire concept of it and 90%+ of the details. The simple fact is that it vastly increases the debt to give tax breaks to the wealthy that nearly all economists agree won't help the economy, and then gives a few hundred dollars a year to everyone else so they can claim the

So, that guy down the street who's running a modest landscaping business and will come out thousands of dollars ahead every year, the hell with him?

And the other guy down the street who's running a modest landscaping business will lose thousands of dollars a year from extra taxes. It all depends on what state they live in and what deductions they may be losing. A little higher taxes on the higher end of the middle class ($50k-$300k yearly income) wouldn't be such a bad thing if it wasn't funding massive tax breaks on the ultra-wealthy.

They can cut taxes on the poor, working, and middle class without the massive tax breaks to the wealthy and drastically

So, that guy down the street who's running a modest landscaping business and will come out thousands of dollars ahead every year, the hell with him?

When the guy running the landscaping business finds out he can't deduct his family's medical expenses any more he's going to realize he just got screwed by the Republicans in congress. Especially since his landscaping business puts him in a category that usually has higher-than-average medical expenses

And when he realizes that he's no longer going to get ANY sort of help for his insurance premiums and can't afford insurance at all, he's going to be royally pissed.

I like how you've made substantial points illustrating the ways in which the plan is worse than the current arrangement. Your points are so compelling! Let me guess, you've learned this form of communication by hanging out with your fellow liberals? Man, they've really taught you how to impress. Keep up the good work! You're exactly why the left lost nearly a thousand legislative seats under Obama, most of the governorships, both houses of congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, and the good will of m

Then be honest. The vast majority of the middle class takes the standard deduction, which doubles under the "R's" tax plan.

The vast majority of the middle class making under $50k yearly per year take the standard deduction, but the majority of middle class families making over $75k yearly itemize their deductions. This plan does help the majority of middle class Americans a little, and helps wealthy Americans a lot. This is all paid for by the upper middle class, middle class citizens in many blue states, and all citizens overall by increasing national debt. It is the bill that wealthy donors have been working for years to get passed under the illusion it will help the economy. In truth it is merely a huge tax break for the wealthy.

So anyone who doesn't work for the university but goes there has to earn $80,000 a year and pay taxes on it. Really, there should just be a tax deduction for paying tuition instead. I thought there was already, but I could be wrong, so they still shouldn't need to pay taxes on that. Depends how they write that.

There are tax deductions (and credits) for tuition. One expired last year, and the others (with the exception of the American Opportunity Tax Credit and the deduction from Schedule C income for education expenses that also happen to be ordinary and necessary business expenses in the exact same trade, business, or profession) are being stripped away by this bill.
The only way to win is to go 1099, which I guess the Big Corporations would prefer, since all the labor laws and liabilities go out the window.

Probably not: NFL players are payed so much no one cares, and College Football players are already treated like indentured servant crap and the only ones you hear complaining about it occasionally are kind of libertarians.

Seriously, we're talking about people who are sacrificing their bodies for our entertainment (including up to death at times). People don't actually care about the players' taxes.

Just FYI, any time you are given something of value, it is income. Someone lets you live in their house for free? Income. Someone writes off a debt instead of collecting it? Income. Someone waives a fee they normally charge? Income. A friend gives you an interest-free loan, or even just at below-market interest rates? The IRS has tables to calculate how much income you are required to report. I'm kinda astonished that these tuition waivers weren't always taxed, since everything else is.

There is an exemption for gifts, up to $13,000 per person per person per year. (not a typo) They must be bona fide gifts with no strings or conditions.

This is nonsense. You realize taxable income only on items of value (including in-kind) when part of an economic transaction.

Let a friend live in your house? Not income. Write off a debt? Potentially income, depending on the specifics of the debt. Fee waivers? Not income, simply a reduction in price. (Newsflash: Coupons aren't income.) Interest-free loans? Not an issue unless connected to some other transaction and in reality away of compensa

Actually, while I agree with you in principle, the "value" in "something of value" isn't value-to-you, it's value-to-others. That is to say it needs to be something that you could, in theory, sell/transfer/profit-from or otherwise be able to spend.

If I paint your walls, it ain't income because there's no way for you to create money from that paint. (with myriad exceptions of course, but most of the time there ain't).

So "value", in this case, would need to be the work experience, or the degree, or the work product. But it likely can't be the general education itself, which is a good example of something that has a lot of worth, but no value.

And really, here's a better example. A library is a sheltered comfortable place where you can read a book. If I let you come into my building, even my office building, so you can read a book in piece, every day during lunch, it ain't "value" in terms of rent, income, or otherwise, Neither is my free wifi.

All of my opinions being what they are, I think your country and this bill is a whole lot of craziness. It clearly doesn't support the actual objectives that you seem to have, nor does it accomplish anything of significance. It doesn't create more STEM people for sure. And just how many of these $10K taxes are you actually going to get out of this? Is it at all worthwhile?

And you need to enforce it. And you need to collect it. And you need to track it. And in the end, they'll just change it to a volunteer position and an award instead of a degree, and they'll easily dodge the tax definition. Blood from a stone is really easy to do, but you don't get very much blood, and you're not left with much of a stone. So what's the point?

And in the end, they'll just change it to a volunteer position and an award instead of a degree, and they'll easily dodge the tax definition.

Until the "award" now has a defined value in the marketplace, which it will as soon as employers treat them as equal to a degree from the same institution.

Blood from a stone is really easy to do, but you don't get very much blood, and you're not left with much of a stone.

The issue is that universities sit on millions if not billions of dollars in endowments, pay no taxes, and hand out $50K tuition wavers in exchange for labor they would otherwise have to pay a market salary for.

So what's the point?

If this were done by any other employer it would incur a tax bill for the employe

In Germany living for free in a house is only income if the house is property of your employer or if your employer is involved in paying for it.I can life for free everywhere else, regardless if it is my GFs flat, my fathers or the second house of my father.

What is next? You own the house you live in and get taxed for the rent you safe by not paying it to yourself?

When you're in graduate school for a doctorate it lasts 4 years plus. Typically, you're only taking actual classes for the first 1.5 to 3 years. After that, it's more like an apprenticeship than school. You're signed up for "classes" that don't have lectures, tests, writing assignments, or etc. It's a way to give you academic credit, on paper, for the process of conducting research that the university makes money on. That, and a way to claim people who are acting in every way as apprentice employees are students.

So: an institution pays itself money to cover the privilege or working for it, and you expect people to pay taxes on that? And we're supposed to trust the institution's assessment of what it provides is worth, considering that almost nobody pays for it out of pocket? You realize that the entire reason for nominal tuition being as high as it is is because it allows the schools to enact Price Discrimination, so they can get more money from students who they assess to have more, right?

In the early 1990s this tax on tuition waivers as income was proposed, I believe it never passed back then.

I had just finished my masters' but I remember being incensed at the economics of it. With tuition waivers, I was living on $1200/month as a teaching assistant and getting my degree. Without tuition waivers, I would have been paying tax on $3000/month total "income" which would have taken away about half of my actual cash income - turning my situation from independent and sustainable to one of dependence on my parents to continue to foot the bills for my education. Other majors' TA salaries were much lower, and it would have turned them from earning small pocket money while getting a degree into paying out of pocket to cover the taxes.

Face value of tuition is a farce, so many students are given tuition waivers, scholarships, reduced rates, etc. Taxing it at face value would be like paying sales tax on the sticker price of a car, regardless of what you negotiated it down to; but worse, cars are only marked up 20%, I'd put average tuition markup closer to 60% at many of the "higher priced" institutions.

Tuitions have skyrocketed because of the wide availability of government-backed loans (i.e. the government promises to repay the loan if the student defaults on it). This has caused lenders to loan money to students like candy because there is no risk to them. The students are then flush full of money, so the schools simply take advantage of it to raise their tuition and sop up the extra money. This extra money has mostly gone into paying for unnecessary administrators [huffingtonpost.com].

Government directly backing universities does not cause this problem. The money goes straight to the school, so there is no incentive for them to raise prices for students. Quite the opposite in fact, since they're now getting additional money from another source and thus can lower tuition.

Supply-side government incentives and demand-side government incentives have these different effects on the market. Politicians should really think about these effects (or in many cases learn about them since they seem completely ignorant) before implementing government subsidies.

Giving students easier access to money to pay for school is a demand-side incentive. What should happen is the increased demand causes more universities to be built, and the increased competition lowers prices (tuitions). But schools are not commodities. Schools with good reputations are in higher demand, so increasing the availability of money just makes more students apply to these schools. Demand goes up, supply stays constant, price goes up.

Giving money to universities is a supply-side incentive. The government can even add conditions to receiving that money, like requiring tuitions not exceed a certain % of the median family income.

The U.S. college and university economics are so screwed up right now because of these student loans, grants, and scholarships, that the only solution I can see now is to aggressively shift money away from those programs and into public universities (with the stipulation that the public university keep tuitions reasonable). If you're poor, you'll still be able to go to college, but it'll be a public university, not a private ivy league college. Then wait for that additional funding to increase the reputation and competitiveness of public universities. That increased competition plus funds drying up for private colleges will force them to go on a diet, shedding those unnecessary administrators and reducing other costs, so they can lower tuition.

I'm also pretty close to decided that loans for students are a really bad idea. Loans basically allow you to time-shift money from your future into the present. Since students have their entire future earnings potential ahead of them, this is a massive amount of money that loans allow schools to tap into. Without any loans (or at least publicly funded or supported loans), students will only be able to pay what they can currently afford, and tuitions will fall to match their ability to pay out of pocket.

So, per your own argument, tuition has not skyrocketed because of student loans, it has skyrocketed because government massively cut direct funding to universities. You seem oblivious to the fact that essentially all people who advocate that there be government-backed student loans would also prefer direct university funding instead, but the neo-cons cut that off and the response was to move to a student loan-based system. If we returned to direct government support of schools, the student debt problem would vanish.

Your proposed course of action is ridiculous. If you remove loans from the mix, tuition will skyrocket even more and access to higher education in the US for anyone except the hyper-rich will disappear overnight. Even by your own arguments you are advocating for the wrong thing. You should be advocating for a return to a direct funding model for universities -- that will not destroy the education system and will obviate the need for large student loans, exactly per your arguments.

all I am reading from social media (a total mix of red, blue and non-US folks) is that the conservatives are SO into 'stigginit' ('sticking it', as in sticking it to the liberals; fucking them over, basically) that they'll spite themselves just so that the other sides suffers.

I cannot ever remember hearing a liberal WISH that conservatives suffer or experience pain or a bad life. NEVER in my life have I heard any liberal say that. but I'm always hearing about how conservatives HATE liberals (that word is

Some day, hopefully soon, we're going to have a Harvey Weinstein moment about these tuition costs and the criminal cabal that is the university employees, administrators, and loan companies. Because someone is spending that $50k income from that student's tuition.

I'm glad the tax exempt status is going away. The only way this college crime syndicate is going to fall is when it hurts everyone everywhere.

Then we'll all have the Weinstein Effect: "Hey that college rap$d me!" "You too, huh? They rap$d me too bu

I can see Minimum wage violationslaws about Company scrip (must live on site and must take classes) you get them for free but are locked in and taxed at the full retail rate.Being forced to pay for stuff (IRS sees as income) you can't really make full use of (you must miss class for teams games / other needs)disability employment discrimination / disability employment accommodations issues (under IRS rules student athletes seen as employees getting an income)workers comp issues (under IRS rules student athletes can be seen as employees getting an income)they are seen as employees by the IRS and they use that to make unionize pass the northwestern case was close but what the IRS says may push it over the edge

If an employer gives an employee $20,000 in salary as actual money, the employee has to declare that as income and pay applicable tax on that. If the employer gives the employee a car worth $20,000 the employee has to declare that as income and pay the same tax on it. If the employer (the university in this case) gives the employee x amount of free tuition that they would otherwise have to pay for, why shouldn't that be taxed?

A lot of the university "goods" are intangibles at fake, overhyped suggested retail prices, instead of the actual, highly discounted prices that most students pay after "scholarships" or other aid. Some sort of national cap price should apply. Or simply wait for the market to re-arrange the student choices of preferred "good" schools' tuition policies.

Ignore the small-souled bean counters who are entirely convinced you will never wind up making a contribution to a cure for cancer, or the first workable fusion reactor, or add a small piece of the puzzle to the problems of aging or perhaps limb regeneration.

These are conservatives. They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. As far as they're concerned, you aren't an investment. You're nothing but an up-scale counter clerk, worth not one cent more than the hours you worked yesterday.

Come on up to Canada, or maybe move to the EU. The US is already falling behind in cutting edge research. The so-called "god particle" was discovered at CERN because these bean-counting half wits yanked funding from the planned US particle accelerator that would have relegated CERN's large hadron collider to the dustbin. And China has just built a hyper-sonic wind tunnel that blows the doors off anything in the US.

Even if the current crop of envious, anti-intellectual cretins is swept from power, the damage they have already done will take a decade to fix, maybe longer. If you want to win a Nobel Prize some day, you would do better to come to a country where "research" isn't defined as "can you write software to cut a millisecond off e-trades and make Goldman Sachs even richer".

Estate Tax is being repealed in this very same GOP plan. How can anyone argue that inheritance isn't income? And the assets in an inheritance (property, stocks, bonds) have their basis (original cost) magically stepped up to present value and thereby dodging the normal Capital Gains tax.

It appears the Republicans favor old money, the idle rich and trust fund babies than they do scientists, doctors, educators, engineers - you know the people that actually make American Great.

If they are going to tax the tuition waiver, set graduate tuition at $1 and let the student pay $0.20 or whatever to the IRS.

Universities don't want to do this, of course, because it's a way of siphoning money from research grants into the general fund. Which is kind of hilarious (at least it was to me when I was a grad student) because the university already takes 'overhead' that is meant to cover mundane things infrastructure, grounds, offices, keeping the lights on. And it's not a small take, most overhead is calculated at 50% or so of the grant (that is, if the grant is $100K to do research, the NIH will kick in another $50K to the university, 1/3rd being overhead).

So even after taking overhead, the university then wants to take the grant money and use it to pay itself a tuition waiver.

A few notes before someone actually believes I'm a right wing troll: I think we should be increasing funding on research, I think we should better support grad students. Universities do provide a needed structure for all this, but are woefully inefficient and mismanaged, which in the end means less money for actual research and teaching. To be against this is not to be against the university, it's to be for the university's ultimate mission.

Republicans, in their current composition, don't like education, don't like people who aren't millionares, and don't like people to be upwardly mobile. We got it.

So, that's one less avenue to university education. The remaining ones are: (a) be frightfully good and get a full scholarship, (b) have rich parents, (c) join the army and try to qualify for a paid-for education.

Everyone else leave for Canada, the UK, or Europe. Don't worry, we'll make good the shortfall with Indians, Chinese, and Europeans in the software and engineering R&D jobs and PhD. classes.

That is exactly what America needs. We need to drive out or discourage anyone capable of creating progress in society. That explains why the House and Senate are the way they are. Those guys get big bucks in exchange for either doing nothing at all or doing exactly what America does not need. Maybe if we are really lucky everyone involved in advanced science or technology will go work for Russia or Turkey or Saudi Arabia. That way they will have all the tools required to put America out of our misery. So what chunk of this pie goes to trump?

I’m a graduate student at M.I.T., where I study the neurological basis of mental health disorders. My peers and I work between 40 and 80 hours a week as classroom teachers and laboratory researchers, and in return, our universities provide us with a tuition waiver for school. For M.I.T. students, this waiver keeps us from having to pay a tuition bill of about $50,000 every year...

Inheritance is income... it now won't be taxed. The heirs receive a huge windfall AND the assets in Estates have their base stepped up - completely dodging capital gains tax. But lowly Grad Student will be taxed on something they never see and pay taxes in the realm of 30% on a poverty level income.

Why should students go to an expensive, reputable college only to be taught by other students? That's cheap, ineffective and retarded. Teachers should teach, students should learn.

Teachers (aka tenured faculty members) do teach. They just don't do all of the teaching. Nor could they. There's just too much to do.

Part of the job of a graduate student is to assist with teaching, because that's part of the academic training they're getting. They're learning to be practitioners in their field, and that includes teaching it.

It's unusual for a graduate student to be a course instructor. Usually they lead tutorials, grade papers, assist in laboratory classes or seminars, and so on.

Because you apparently don't understand what a research student is. It's someone who's considered trained in the subject to such an extent that they're able to do seminal research on it. The thing they're now being taught is how to do research, not the subject, since they already know enough about the subject that they're able to invent new parts of the subject.

Unsurprisingly, people who know so much about a subject that they're inventing a new part of it are generally trusted to teach other people about

Without these waivers, you would have to work like the rest of us. Instead, you get free education.

They are working. They are paying for their education with their labor. The government values a highly educated workforce, so it provides tax incentives to increase the number of people who can afford an education. This simply reduces government funding and reduces the quality of education in our country. That is all.

... and in turn, reduces the number of intelligent, motivated and educated foreign students who will move to the USA.

In turn the workforce will become less educated, productivity will drop and the USA will slide down the wealth tables.

The influence of the USA worldwide will also reduce because there will be fewer students who get an advanced education in the USA and return to their home country, taking with them American values and mind share.

Under current US tax law, the tuition waiver is not considered income. Now the Rs in the house want to consider it as such. The end result is that graduate students would have an enormous increase in their tax burden, so much so that many may need to abandon their studies. That sure sounds like "levying a tax" to me.

Normally I'd think that neither leftists nor rightists want to discourage people from pursuing graduate degrees. Now I'm not so sure. If only the rich can afford to go to school, then only the rich will profit from the rewards of education. Is this what Rs want?

As for taxes on corporations, let's just deal with a few points here. First of all, an oft-repeated mantra is that the US has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. But that ignores the numerous deductions and exemptions that businesses use to reduce their effective tax rate to something that is about average when compared with the rest of the world. Nevertheless, companies find and use tax havens (like in Ireland) where they can stash their cash and avoid paying US taxes. With a reduction in corporate tax rates, I would not be surprised if these foreign tax havens further reduce their tax rates to keep US companies from repatriating their money. That won't be good for either them or the US. And even if that money is repatriated, what guarantee do we have that it will result in more jobs? Companies will still keep their manufacturing outside the US if it's profitable to do so.

All taxation is theft. It is the violent, forceful confiscation of the property of another. The only ethical tax rate is 0.

Good luck with that. Sovereign nations have been taxing their citizens for pretty much all of recorded history.

Normally I'd think that neither leftists nor rightists want to discourage people from pursuing graduate degrees. Now I'm not so sure. If only the rich can afford to go to school, then only the rich will profit from the rewards of education. Is this what Rs want?

It doesn't seem to make sense -- one would think that uneducated people cost the system more money than they return. But the more I look at our education system, the more I think that it is indeed the case that the rich want to keep the poor and middle class from getting an education.

This tax bill includes a removal of the ability of teachers to deduct a few hundred bucks spent on school supplies for their work. Talk about going out of your way to make things hard for little gain. Seems crazy to suffer the political penalty for doing this unless they really believe that publicly available education should work poorly.

The difference in this case is that they are working at below-market rates to get that waiver, so in some sense it really is part of their income. But the biggest problem with taxing it is determining the fair value of the waiver because tuition is often discounted for other reasons.

I donâ(TM)t think it should be taxed, but there is a sane argument for doing so.

Youngsters like you have a lot of learning to do. When you graduate high school and move on to college, or a to work life, you'll eventually come to see all the things that this country could not do without a pool of money. The roads you drive on, the basic research that leads to medical and engineering advances, even the Internet, would be impossible without taxation. Taxation is not theft, it's simply expecting citizens to contribute to a collection of beneficial services.

It's unfortunate that your high school curriculum is probably so simplified that you've been duped into believing something so simplistic and naive. The time is now, before you enter college, to accept that your limited life experience has not yet allowed you to comprehend the complexities of the world. It's not a personal insult -- many of us go through the stage where our ability to make (more or less) logical arguments exceeds our legitimate knowledge of the world. But the greatest barrier to your future learning as a young adult is your rigid certainty that you know all there is to know about the world. The sooner you acknowledge your limited experience, the sooner you will begin to understand the complexity around you.

Your tax dollars help to support common resources, such as police and firefighters. Tax money helps to ensure the roads you travel on are safe and well-maintained. Taxes fund public libraries and parks.

* Sadly with the rich changing governmental rules, getting tax support for their pet businesses projects, donations to political campaigns with pay-to-play arrangements with PACs, and support for gerrymandering, and with examples of failing common resources (roads crumbling and bridges collapsing)... it is be

BTW, a single Gulfstream 650 is about $65 million base price. It goes up from there.

Gulfstream's margin is very slim. Which means most of that $65 Mil goes to workers, suppliers, supplier's workers, etc.

What universities can do is simply eliminate tuition for graduate students across the board. While some may choose to not work ( in some non-scientific areas), most will anyway since their PhD depends on their demonstrating skills that can only be obtained throu

Definitely not. Trump is, first and foremost, an authoritarian, the exact opposite of a classical liberal. Classical liberals like JS Mill, John Locke, and Thomas Paine provided the inspiration for the American experiment in democracy.

Authoritarians like Hitler, Stalin, and Trump revile free speech, education, science, and empiricism. Divine authority cannot tolerate questioning. It requires unassailable certitude and ignorant compliance from the masses. So we can expect this new wave of Trumpism to make education, especially at advanced levels, a primary target.

Graduate students are generally lazy and entitled. Grad student offices are generally places where very little work actually gets done.

Are you fucking high? You must never have been a grad student.

Nowadays, grad students mainly get their tuition waivers by being either teacher's assistants or research assistants and in both cases they're basically working their asses off for minimum wage. I know this because I just came from a meeting of TA's and they're teaching the classes, grading the papers and homework and entering all the grades. They are busting their butts for the measly tuition waivers.

Remember, what's happening here is that the GOP will be taxing people making less than 30k per year so they can afford to give their corporate donors a fat tax break.

And you're going to pay far more taxes under this new bill. Medical expenses will no longer be deductible (and more people will have medical expenses because 13 million people will lose health care the first year). Your local and state taxes will no longer be deductible (and if you live in parts of the country where people wear shoes and have access to dental care, that will mean a huge bite out of your bottom line). You don't have a clue about how fucked you are under the new bill. You've played yourself.

I'm hearing this thinking "how is this different than personal mileage on my company car?" It isn't, it's a fringe benefit. And if it is a fringe benefit, then it's considered income. At the very least, its taxation should be modified under existing tuition tax law.

but you are not billed full price company car by the IRS and that cost pulls you under min wage.

Under this you are forced to buy something to do your job your cost $0 income by the IRS $$$$$ and that income is more then your pay.

Let's say Mcdonalds give workers free high cost uniforms to there works that they must use and they do get to use them out side of work so the IRS sees them as income. The uniforms have a list price of $8K-$12K/year = a big tax bill for some makeing around $15K a year pre tax.

You know, there's absolutely nothing to stop the colleges from dropping their prices to what students actually pay so that this isn't anywhere near as much of a problem. Of course I wouldn't be surprised if the colleges do this because there's a really fucked up financial incentive for them in pretending that college tuition actually costs $40,000 per year.

I can understand why there's a desire to subsidize graduate education (and I can also understand why plenty of people don't want to have to pay for it

Grad students don't get tuition waivers "given" to them. They earn them as RA's and TA's and work their asses off.

And they get a $50,000 benefit that other students pay $50,000 for - a years tuition at a graduate school like MIT.

This is a tax hike on people making minimum wage.

Uhm, no. Minimum wage is $7.45/hr (give or take), and once you factor in the value of their tuition waver, $50,000, in order for graduate students to be considered working at the minimum wage would have them doing 6,711 hours/year ($50K/$7.45), heck, if they were paid the so-called living wage of $15/hr that would still have them toiling away 3,333 hours/year. Are you claiming that grad student

You don't "get it" because of all the shit you have where normal people have brains.

Progressives are the reason this country exists. Conservatives prefer the authoritarian rulers, like King George, but progressives fought against that and formed a country where people had a say in their government. Those progressives are now the "left" you talk whine about.

The civil war, conservatives in the south seceded from the union... the actually broke up this country, something you claim "the left" wants to do, but never has. It took more progressives to stand up and say no... that this was a United country.

As a side point here... all this bullshit about confederate monuments being history or legacy... no. They are monuments to traitors to this country, who murdered hundreds of thousands citizens of the United States. Now, some intentionally ignorant prople may think "traitor" might be harsh... but, i use it in actual terms. Johnson pardoned the traitors, something he wouldn't have had to do if they were not traitors. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu... [ucsb.edu]

"The left" isn't trying to destroy the country they created, but now days they are not willing to compromise with those who think that the rights and benefits of the country should only be for some of the citizens. That's the position of the conservatives.... and has been for a while. Conservatives railed against blacks having rights, and when they lost that argument, they switched to gays. Conservatives have to have someone to blame, because they simply cannot accept responcibility for ANYTHING they've done.

We do understand that out country has done some shitty things, but anyone with any functioning brain cells and open eyes should be able to see that. Global warmongers... yeh, that's us; more specifically, it's the god damn cowards we have in this country who are afraid of anyone that looks different, or big business that make their scratch off something some other country has and they want, or who directly produce military hardware.

Slavery... yeh, that was us. People enslaving people. I really should have to say that's bad, but there are some people in the world (and in the USA) who are simply so damn stupid they can't see that's a bad thing. Jim Crow laws.... yep, anyone with a brain could see that was bad. Sadly, again, we have a lot of people without functioning brains in this country.

Deplorable? Oh yeh, i get it... some people can't pay attention for more than a few seconds, so you need soundbites to help you out. Lets review:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it.

I'd argue that she was right... maybe not on the percentage, but certainly on the characterization. She defined who those she thought were deplorable by their traits... which is why it's funny, in a sad, stupid way, that people wear these t-shits with "deplorable" written on it. I'd normally at least give them props for honesty, but i doubt any of them even know what Hillary said... they just think it's because they're Trump supporters, instead of someone having some of the worst traits of the human species. Kinda like these dipshits wearing Gadsen Flag t-shirts with the Jefferson quote... they don't even know what the quote was about, but they twist it to something simplistic that they don't have to bother thinking about; if they only had a clue... which they obviously don't.

Now, i understand.. you're probably like a lot of conservatives. You've been lied to by snake oil salesmen that want you to elect them, and you've been gullible enough to do just that. The problem is, these people only give a damn about themselves... not you, not me, not anyone that they can't get something from. They've brainwashed you into thinking completely backwards and ign